Talk: Nadia Berthouze – The Emo & Pain Project, 27. April 2015

Dr. Nadia Berthouze is a Reader at the University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC). Her research focuses on body posture/movement and touch behaviour as means to automatically recognise and modulate affective experience. She investigates these modalities in the areas of technology for physical rehabilitation, textile design, the game industry, ubiquitous computing in healthcare, among others. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Milano. From 1996 to 2006, she worked in Japan, first as postdoc fellow working in the area of Kansei Engineering and then as lecturer in computer science at the University of Aizu.

“The Emo & Pain Project: Facilitating physical activity in Chronic Low Back Pain. Can interactive technology support people with chronic pain to remain physically active? In this talk I present results from a set of qualitative studies with people with chronic pain to understand what strategies they use to carry out physical activity in daily life and what factors deter them; and physiotherapists to understand how they support them. I then present two design studies that build on this understanding. The first study demonstrates how auditory feedback could be used to address some of the psychological barriers and needs identified and leads to an increase in self-efficacy, motivation and confidence in physical activity. The second study features our system to automatically recognize people’s pain level and pain-related affective states during physical activity.”